This invention relates generally to digital amplifiers, and more specifically to converting a sampled digital signal to a naturally sampled digital signal.
Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is widely used in a variety of applications such as digital audio amplifiers and control applications including motor controllers. Many of these applications convert a sampled digital signal to a pulse-width modulation signal in order to obtain high efficiency and high accuracy. However, as accuracy increases, so does the amount and complexity of the computations required to perform the signal conversion. A uniformly sampled PWM signal requires less computation but has distortion and no linearity. On the other hand, while more complicated to compute, a naturally sampled PWM signal maintains both linearity and signal integrity. Therefore, a need exists for a computationally efficient method for converting a uniformly sampled signal to a naturally sampled signal which may then be used to produce a naturally sampled PWM signal.